for persecution and the
pressure of the lower strata in ecclesiastical organizations for cruel
measures, see Balmes's Le Protestantisme compare au Catholicisme, etc.,
fourth edition, Paris, 1855, vol. ii. Archbishop Spaulding has something
of the same sort in his Miscellanies. L'Epinois, Galilee, p. 22 et seq.,
stretches this as far as possible to save the reputation of the Church
in the Galileo matter. As to the various branches of the Protestant
Church in England and the United States, it is a matter of notoriety
that the smug, well-to-do laymen, whether elders, deacons, or vestrymen,
are, as a rule, far more prone to heresy-hunting than are their better
educated pastors. As to the cases of Messrs. Winchell, Woodrow, Toy,
and all the professors at Beyrout, with details, see the chapter in this
series on The Fall of Man and Anthropology. Among Protestant historians
who have recently been allowed full and free examination of the
treasures in the Vatican Library, and even those involving questions
between Catholicism and Protestantism, are von Sybel, of Berlin, and
Philip Schaff, of New York. It should be added that the latter went with
commendatory letters from eminent prelates in the Catholic Church in
America and Europe. For the closing citation, see Canon Farrar, History
of Interpretation, p. 432.

CHAPTER IV. FROM "SIGNS AND WONDERS" TO LAW IN THE HEAVENS.

I. THE THEOLOGICAL VIEW.

Few things in the evolution of astronomy are more suggestive than the
struggle between the theological and the scientific doctrine regarding
comets--the passage from the conception of them as fire-balls flung by
an angry God for the purpose of scaring a wicked world, to a recognition
of them as natural in origin and obedient to law in movement. Hardly
anything throws a more vivid light upon the danger of wresting texts
of Scripture to preserve ideas which observation and thought have
superseded, and upon the folly of arraying ecclesiastical power against
scientific discovery.(88)

(88) The present study, after its appearance in the Popular Science
Monthly as a "new chapter in the Warfare of Science," was revised
and enlarged to nearly its present form, and read before the American
Historical Association, among whose papers it was published, in 1887,
under the title of A History of the Doctrine of Comets.

Out of the ancient world had come a mass of beliefs regarding comets,
meteors, and eclipses; all these